Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (Italian: [fiˈlippo tomˈmaːzo mariˈnetti]; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
Childhood and adolescence
Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio Marinetti") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father, Enrico Marinetti, and mother, Amalia Grolli, lived together more uxorio (as if married). Enrico was a lawyer from Piedmont, and his mother was the daughter of a literary professor from Milan. They had come to Egypt in 1865 at the invitation of Khedive Isma'il Pasha to act as legal advisers for foreign companies that were taking part in his modernization program.
Marinetti's love for literature developed during the school years. His mother was an avid reader of poetry and introduced her young son to the Italian and other European classics. At 17, he started his first school magazine, Papyrus; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Émile Zola's scandalous novels in the school.
He studied in Egypt and then in Paris, obtained a baccalauréat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne University and in Italy, and graduated in law at the University of Pavia in 1899.
